You strumpet!

It's OK to get upset. It's not like you have much of a choice. It just happens. The important thing is to eventually stop being upset, recognize the world for what it is, and adapt.

tl; dr; Looking back, the best relationships took off like rockets. But there's a flipside. When they broke up, we lost the ability to read each other's minds just as fast. The long version. I have a guideline. When meeting somebody new, I got one date to determine if we really really like each other. For instance, we don't have to sleep together on the first date, but I do ask myself if it's really obvious that's where it's headed. If I'm, like, "Well I'm not sure, I might need a second date to..." That means no. The dating pool is enormous. For every shoe there is a foot. There's no sense getting into a relationship where I have to fight uphill because there are probably literally thousands of girls in this city who are basically perfect for me. I know this because I've found them before, and we were obviously in love by the end of night one. A great first date starts off in show horse mode. We're both nervously prancing

Putting tools away is a piece of cake when there's plenty of space leftover in the toolbox. Just chuck 'em in there and get on with your day. But stuff likes to expand, so the toolbox tends to be full to overflowing, so the tools don't get put away, and now there are tools all over the house, and now you spend 15 minutes muttering under your breath searching for your hammer. Ain't nobody got time for that. Clearly, you need to clear things out of your toolbox. Clearing things out of your toolbox is easy when there's plenty of time leftover in your day. But commitments like to expand, so the day tends to be full to overflowing, so the toolbox doesn't get cleared, etc. You've got resources like time, money, space, and cognitive load. Stuff likes to expand and use it all up. Things are going to spill over. That's how life works. Things in general tend to be kind of a frustrating mess with not enough room to move around in. And everything's connected!

Most children hate spicy food. They just don't get it. Why in god's green earth would you hurt your mouth like that?! They chomp on something spicy and they literally cry, they're so upset. So I think part of growing up is learning to appreciate certain types of pain. Pain is an acquired taste. I used to hate painful back massages. Now, a little older and creakier, I just love 'em. What's better than somebody just DIGGING their elbows and knuckles into the knots in my back? It's like Tabasco on breakfast. Being spanked, universally hated by kids, enjoyed by a certain segment of the adult population. Now, if there's more Tabasco than egg, I'm not gonna enjoy that. There's a balance. Let me take care here. I'm NOT saying more pain is always good, or that all pain is good. I'm saying that as a kid I enjoyed no pain whatsoever, but as an adult, I'm learning to enjoy certain types of pain at certain levels. I think this might be true for em

Imagine you're an ancient king and you wanna invade your neighbor. Your army will need stuff. One thing you could do is enslave blacksmiths and farmers and so on. Slavery is a tough sell though. Slaves tend to resent being slaves, so you get running away behavior. Not to worry, there's a better way. You make coins and you give these coins to your soldiers. Then you tax everyone in your country in those coins, on pain of being eviscerated by your new soldiers. How does everyone get coins? Why, by selling boots and wheat to soldiers. Boom. Your soldiers are supplied. Not only that, but do you notice, you've created a system that people literally buy into. They WANT to supply your soldiers because that's how you get these coins that everybody wants. You know, we could just do that for everybody. We could give everybody money, not just soldiers. Then, boom, you've got the whole country providing for itself. You don't even need to give everybody THAT much. Imagine

My sister just wrote a post about how diversity isn't enough . She's saying that diversity is wonderful and important, and I totally agree. But she's saying that diversity in-and-of-itself is not THE most important thing, that THE most important thing has something to do with a system that enriches the rich at the expense of the poor. I couldn't agree more. $pread is a best-of anthology of articles written by sex workers. It's my favorite book I've ever read on the topic, probably because it's by sex workers and not by law enforcement. I mean, it's all propaganda all the way down. Movies like Tricked are propaganda for law enforcement and $pread is propaganda for sex workers. But where law enforcement propaganda is universally and transparently self serving, totally misrepresenting and misunderstanding the very people they're trying to "help" and always including a message about how important it is to hire yet more police officers, $prea

My son mentioned yesterday that they say the pledge of allegiance every day at school. I said, hey, that's something we have in common, because I had to say it every day growing up too. Then I explained propaganda to him. Let's say you're in power. Your job is a lot easier if everybody is on board with you. So you repeat a message over and over about how great everything is, regardless of if it's true. Like, do we actually live in a land "with liberty and justice for all"? Of course not. You don't have to be very old to see through that one. Then he mentioned that they sing, "My country tis of thee sweet land of liberty," every day and we laughed at how that doesn't even make grammatical sense any more. The funny thing of course is that propaganda works sometimes. Repeat that message over and over again and under the right conditions, people will agree. There's probably some underlying physiological explanation, like hearing a repeated